Year: 2007

If you read this in an RSS feed, you won’t have seen that my blog description has changed — I’m moving from the Data Protection Manager (DPM) team to the Operations Manager team, focusing on management packs. This opens up a whole new world of stuff for me to blog about. I need to learn things…

This isn’t a computer-related post, more like a public service announcement. I’m a Microsoftie, but I’m also a veteran — twenty years active duty in the Air Force. (Microsoft is actually the first civilian company I’ve ever worked for, which amuses me when I think about it — consider the contrast!) Anyway, having been there,…

It’s red. A really deep, rich red. Small and slender, but it feels nicely solid. And here was my setup experience: I had an existing instance of Zune (from the first release), not paired with a device, that I had already upgraded to the new software. I connected the red Zune. The software immediately announced…

I admit that this post has only the most peripheral of relationships to technical writing — but I’m enjoying Free Rice so much, I had to share. It’s a website that generates vocabulary questions. For each question that you answer correctly, the site sponsors donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations. It adds…

If you took a look at the DPM 2007 Operations Guide during the beta, you might have noticed that the server chapters have a similar organization: general maintenance management data recovery And within those sections are parallel topics, such as: renaming the server applying OS updates using Windows maintenance tools A few times I’ve questioned…

Here are a few more questions-and-answers from last week’s DPM 2007 chat session, starting with a very popular question that comes up in the newsgroup frequently: Q: [I’d like to use USB disk instead of tape for offsite and long term archival… will this be in DPM 2007, or is Tape still my only option…

This has been annoying me since I upgraded to Outlook 2007. Sometimes I need to cancel a meeting without sending a cancellation to those invited. For example, when my boss stops me in the hall and says, “I deleted our 1:1 from my calendar for next week because I’m on vacation” — when that happens,…

It was great to “see” so many of you at this morning’s chat on DPM 2007 – the room peaked at 90 people, although the gentleman with the Vista question doesn’t really count. There was a nice variety of questions. I collected them so we can make sure the documentation addresses the issues people are…

The Off Campus blog brought to my attention the coolest Vista trick I’ve learned yet – resizing screens on the fly. Up till now, I thought my only choices were (1) changing the screen resolution, (2) messing with IE’s View settings for web pages, (3) Windows’s Magnifier. All of those are just a bit too…

Adding PowerShell integration to this version of DPM is a big plus — you can use DPM Management Shell to manage multiple DPM servers simultaneously, script oft-performed tasks, even do a few things that you can’t do in the UI (such as removing recovery points). The product development team presents and discusses useful scripts on…

If you’re familiar with DPM 2006, adding disks to the storage pool in DPM 2007 might be confusing because it doesn’t behave the way you expect. You’re not alone – a lot of you using the beta 2 version of DPM 2007 have run into this. So here’s an explanation of DPM 2007 and the…

There will be a chat session on July 31, at 8:00 a.m. (pacific time) to discuss DPM 2007, formerly referred to as V2. This is a great opportunity to get your questions answered, hope to “see” you there! “Get Ready for Data Protection Manager 2007 beta 2”

Check out Jason’s World, a new blog on DPM (and anything else Jason decides to write about). In addition, two of our Technology Adoption Program (TAP) partners are posting about their experiences with DPM on their blogs: DPMFAQ.COM and My Spot on the Internet. Enjoy!

Did you catch the webcast on protecting Virtual Server with DPM? I watched the replay this afternoon and learned a new trick from Allen Stewart (who gives a really excellent presentation, btw). How to identify VSS-aware apps on Windows Server 2003: at a command prompt, type vssadmin list writers. He mentions it in the context…

Another interesting webcast coming up that you won’t want to miss: “Microsoft Virtual Server and Data Protection Manager Install and Configure Walk-through”. Register at the events website. The presentation will also be available for replay later, but try to make it to the live version so you can get your questions answered! For your calendar:…

As you may know, DPM 2007 adds support for tape to DPM 2006’s disk-based protection. So with DPM 2007, you can configure protection disk-to-disk, disk-to-tape, or disk-to-disk-to-tape. But an important question you’ll have is, will DPM work with my existing tape library? Or, what tape library should I get to work with DPM? For your…

I have my first Zune (annoying music warning: turn down volume before clicking that link). I didn’t think it was something I would use and planned to give it to my daughter, but surprise! When I charged it and started playing with it, I really liked it. Now, the music aspect is no big deal…

This doesn’t fit any of the topics I usually write about here, but I’m so tickled that this is my way of shouting it out: CBS is giving “Jericho” another chance! If you didn’t watch “Jericho” when it first began, or perhaps just caught an episode midway through the season, the fuss fans made when…

Stefan Gossner posts about running PRESCAN.EXE against a Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2.0 database before upgrading it to WSS 3.0, and also provides a link to download the tool so you can run it ahead of time. What does this have to do with DPM? Well, if you’re using DPM 2007 Beta 2, you can…

One of the features we added to DPM 2007 is protection of desktop computers (those running Windows XP Professional SP2 or any edition of Vista except Home). But we also say in our documentation, “DPM does not support file protection on laptops…”, and that has raised a few questions. Technically, can you install the DPM…

Where is the information I’m looking for? During the beta 2 release of DPM 2007, the product documentation is available in the Downloads section of the Connect site. Links to DPM 2007 documentation won’t be accurate until the DPM 2007 TechCenter becomes available, which will be during the public release of DPM 2007 (if not…

Glad you asked! Yes, you have a wide array of DPM cmdlets coming your way with DPM 2007 — look for them in the beta 2 release. DPM Management Shell installs with DPM 2007 and can also be installed on remote computers to administer your DPM servers. Are you ready for DPM Management Shell? You…

After watching this, I’ve got the new lyrics running through my head…”I can’t believe it ends so soon, just another intern going back to school…” A tip for watching this video: go to full screen, at least for the opening. I love what they did with Clippy!